Interface

Icons

We wanted to give SQ7 a classic Sierra point-and-click interface, much in the style of SQ4.

This meant icons. LOTS of icons.

We fleshed out a basic version of the top-menu.
The way it worked was to drop down on-top of the window, partially obscuring it.
We had also played with hiding it, but I never liked the effect.

We actually setup SQ7.org to reflect this menu for a while.
While the action icons were cool in the game, they were more confusing out of context.

I still thought it was cool!

The final version was cleaned up, and rendered more tightly.

We set up the Slage engine to allow you re-arrange the interface buttons as you chose.
You can see the basic idea of that at This Flash (Warning, big).

If I were to do it today, I’d do things differently.

I’d do something more akin the Monkey Island 3 cursor, where clicking brought up a radial menu of options. (In their case 2. In ours, maybe more)
I think it scales better to what people can mentally keep track of. In SQ4, I was always worried that if I didn’t use EVERY option on Everything, I’d be missing the funny.

Cursor

Then again, that was part of what made it lovable.

We went through several revisions of the cursor as well, trying to make it visible, but not too garish.






I think we finally got it, though. More Subtle colors.

Window

Our window went through a few revisions, but was basically the same thing.
We wanted it to look like a StarCon communication panel.